from Hacker News

2020 Census Apportionment Results

by kochb on 4/26/21, 8:16 PM with 87 comments

  • by sethbannon on 4/26/21, 8:28 PM

    New York lost a congressional seat by falling 89 residents short. Given that the response window fell during the peak COVID crisis for NYC, it's hard to imagine it didn't have a negative impact on response rate.

  • by sethbannon on 4/26/21, 8:31 PM

    For those wanting to know state congressional seat gains and losses...

    Gaining 2 seats: Texas

    Gaining 1 seat: Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina, Oregon

    Losing 1 seat: California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia

  • by thestoicattack on 4/26/21, 8:32 PM

    House seat changes by state:

        (+2) TX
    (+1) CO, FL, MT, NC, OR
    (-1) CA, IL, MI, NY, OH, PA, WV
     (0) everyone else

  • by deanCommie on 4/26/21, 9:12 PM

    Don't forget - the 2020 census was interfered with for expressly political gains.

    That seems relevant to any discussion if it's outcomes. While states themselves are not nearly as red/blue at the district level as they might be in the aggregate, it is absolutely worth noting that a net 6 additional congressional seats are going from "Blue" states to "Red" states.

    The actual impact of the census may be even bigger than this - for all we knew the REVERSE trend should have occurred as the country's demographics shift.

    * https://publicintegrity.org/politics/system-failure/trump-ob...

    * https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/15/trump-...

    * https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/08/07/trumps-...

  • by exegete on 4/26/21, 8:37 PM

    Is it time to expand the House? It feels like as the population grows we shouldn’t dilute and move around representation.

  • by elliekelly on 4/26/21, 8:32 PM

    > Puerto Rico's resident population was 3,285,874, down 11.8% from 3,725,789 in the 2010 Census.

    Is there any explanation for this?

  • by rossdavidh on 4/26/21, 9:15 PM

    Spare a thought for the census bureau folks, who in an incredibly stressful year and in an incredibly polarized political climate, had to nonetheless get the job done and try to release the data on time and keep their cool and remain objective, all the while knowing that their best case scenario is nobody really thinks about how they did it. Not an easy job.

  • by 1270018080 on 4/26/21, 8:48 PM

    I'm interested to see how Montana will be drawn. I didn't think I'd ever see that happen.

  • by abeppu on 4/26/21, 9:02 PM

    In all the press surrounding the shortened door-to-door period, as well as the legal kerfuffle about asking about citizenship, it was repeatedly stressed that lower counts could also impact federal funding for a range of programs.

    I know the census is supposed to release other stats later this year, but are these state-level resident counts enough to make educated guesses about impacts to stuff beyond the house?

  • by seneca on 4/26/21, 8:30 PM

    The most important bit:

    > Texas will gain two seats in the House of Representatives, five states will gain one seat each (Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina, and Oregon), seven states will lose one seat each (California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia), and the remaining states’ number of seats will not change based on the 2020 Census.

  • by Rafuino on 4/26/21, 8:36 PM

    Now the Q is how will the districts be drawn to make those two new TX districts reliably red, eh?

  • by MattGaiser on 4/26/21, 8:35 PM

    Rhode Island's 2nd congressional district survives for another decade.

  • by standardUser on 4/26/21, 8:35 PM

    The slowing of immigration is starting to make our falling birthrates more noticeable. We'll need to see a surge in immigration in the coming years to avoid the aging problem facing most other wealthy countries.

    Biden's proposed $2 trillion family plan might help if it could ever get passed, but it might be too little too late. Other countries have had far more extreme incentives to have kids for decades and still ended up much farther down the wrong side of the aging curve than we are.

    EDIT: I appreciate the downvotes. But I wonder which you prefer: higher taxes for working people, reduced benefits for the elderly, or more immigrants coming to our nation of immigrants? We need to pick one.

  • by CameronNemo on 4/26/21, 8:39 PM

    It seems absolutely wild to me that we are using pre pandemic population counts to apportion seats.